


Her Guns to His Knives

by Hermit9



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bucky is scarier, Cameos by the rest of the BAU, Criminal Minds Season 6, Criminal Minds fusion, Doyle is a bad man, Explicit Consent, F/M, Implied Past Non-Con, MCU fusion, Rough Sex, Timeline What Timeline, liberties were taken with the legal system, poorly recovered trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-09-18
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:21:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25895113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hermit9/pseuds/Hermit9
Summary: Emily is exposed and alone and, again, she runs. This time, he follows.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Emily Prentiss
Comments: 42
Kudos: 33





	1. Escape

**Author's Note:**

> It's here! Finally! 
> 
> Thanks to [MaverickWerewolf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaverickWerewolf/) and [Goldheartedsky](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldheartedsky) for the beta.
> 
> Many thanks as well to all the people I have been bugging all year about this thing and that cheered me on. Dee and Taff and Frogie, and the WWM crew and the r/FF folks. I love you lots.

## 2000

A hiss. Hinges open, letting in air that is laden with dust and contaminants, so warm it feels like a burn on his skin. The Asset stays still, regulating his breath to small shallow gasps so that his chest doesn’t rise. He doesn’t open his eyes. When the handlers want him to move, they will move him. He can wait. There is less (not none, never none) pain in the waiting. He waits for a day, counting the time by the heartbeats like the ticking of a clock. There is no sound outside of the cryostasis chamber, no voices. No orders.

On the second day, he opens his eyes to darkness. On the third, he pushes open the door, strains until the wood around the cryostasis chamber breaks and he can claw his way out. He is driven by thirst and hunger, by fears expertly layered, and by the stubborn refusal to die.

There are places that are the same no matter where you are in the world. The waiting places, where there is nothing to do but gather dust and hold a breath in the hope that someone comes back with a purpose. Sometimes the waiting is minutes, sometimes hours. And sometimes, something goes wrong in the gears of bureaucracy and things get lost. A manifest here, goods there. A crate, in a warehouse by the railroad, in Siberia.

He finds the rat, teeth still sunk into the stripped wire that killed him, flesh burnt and desiccated. There is snow on the ground outside and he melts it before drinking, cradled against his skin in plastic bags. He breaks into the crates, eats the stale crackers and breakfast cereal, rips and knots the clothes too small for him until there are layers over his skin and the cold stops biting. He waits a week, certain it is a test, that there are eyes on him, watching, judging. No one comes. 

The Asset is trained to be tactical. There is nothing to gain in staying in a place with limited and dwindling supplies. He goes through the crates again, more slowly. He rations the food, divides the rest and then he _waits_. But this time he waits with a purpose, for the wind to rise and the ground to shake with the mechanical, uncaring approach of a train. He doesn’t know where the train is going, other than _away_. For the first time, the Asset smirks, unprompted. Away to an unknown horizon, to the end of the line. 

The blizzard blows snow over the vandalized warehouse, erases his footsteps on the ground.

The Asset vanishes. 

* * *

## 2011

The restaurant is as mediocre as it is forgettable, which Emily figures is why Sean picked it as a meeting location. There are no locals loitering here, no wait staff attentive enough to give a proper description of them if asked. Empty booths and tables are all around them, shoring the conversation with the privacy of a failing business. She doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t want to face the ghost of her past. Not when her hair still smells of the recycled air of the jet, when she has paperwork to fill and gunpowder to wash out of her clothes after one more sanctioned death. It’s not murder if the government says it isn’t. 

“Sean, I’m sorry, I meant to call you back earlier,” she lies, easy and practiced as it rolls off her tongue. Maybe he catches it, but it’s been years so maybe he believes her. “I got caught up in a case, just got back in town.”

He rises when she gets to the table, brings her for an embrace, not too long, just a friend. His beard itches against her cheek, unkempt in a way that matches the dried sweat from his clothes. There’s fear in his eyes.

“It’s ok,” he says as he sits down. “I had to be in D.C. anyway, so it works out for me.” 

“Oh?” she sits, opening the menu to keep the waitress at bay. There’s a weight in her stomach, from the case, from instincts. “Business or personal?” she asks because Sean won’t say what he’s so desperate to say.

“Personal.” He breathes in, leans across the table “Ian Doyle vanished from prison. Interpol can't find him.” 

The weight becomes ice and fire, burning through her blood in adrenaline. Fight or flight. “What... What are you saying?”

“He's off the grid, Emily.” Sean settles back in cheap faux leather, giving her the illusion of space. Leaving things unsaid, like the silence can protect them at all. Vanished from a Russian prison, some of the most inhospitable in the world. Vanished, not escaped or broken out, gone like a ghost. It speaks of money, of influence and contacts. Of boots on the ground, networks thought dismantled being alive and well. 

“Do you think he's headed here?” She stops. Here is a useless variable. It’s not a city or even a country that betrayed Ian Doyle. It’s a woman, who loved him in all the wrong ways, and whom he loved in all the ways he knew how. “Am I in danger?”

Sean looks at her, doesn’t answer, lets her fill in the blank. She is. He is. They all are. Everyone who sought out Valhalla. He drops a few bills on the table, too much for his drink and the order she never made and walks out. Emily waits until she’s sure she won’t know which way he went and goes home. She looks for a tail as she leaves but doesn’t see one. She’s too well trained to let that be much of a comfort.

Sleep doesn’t come easy when she makes it back to the apartment. The city’s skyline twinkles as lights follow other’s routines. The view is too grand for her salary as an agent, something she thinks the team is bound to have noticed by now. Garcia, if no one else, with her fingers on everyone’s electronic lives. Or Morgan, who works the market to balance out the darkness of their lives with bright spaces and floods of natural light. Sergio purrs against her chest as Emily curls under the stiff fabric of the bed cover. She is aware, almost too aware, of where her weapon is, of all the noises around her. Blink after lingering blink she chases the number on her clock through 3 A.M. and all its secrets.

Her alarm is shrill and joins the attacks on her consciousness that are Sergio’s claws on her arm. She hushes the phone with the same jerky movement that sends the cat clattering to the floor with an indignant _meep_.

Emily takes her time getting ready, smoothing the frizz of her hair and hiding the dark circle under her eyes, until the reflection betrays nothing of her fears and slots firmly back into her life. The drive to Quantico soothes, both from familiar music humming low on the radio and an itinerary that has enough turns to make sure she’s casually checked her mirrors a few times. She’s late to the office, but for all that the BAU is in demand, they’re also given a lot more leeway in how they handle themselves between active cases. There is always more paperwork, reports, or remote consultations to be done. Unless they have a case, office hours are a suggestion, not a diktat.

She lets the ambient hum of the bullpen soothe her. She is safe, surrounded by highly trained people and layers of security that rival most banks. More guns to make up for the lack of vaults, though with the trade-off of fewer privacy screens.

It takes all of two hours to remind herself that despite everything else she’s grown to love while working for intelligence and law enforcement, she loathes paperwork. Not the action, the scratch of ballpoint on paper, the crumbling of receipts to fill out expenses, not even trying to find perfectly passive-voice objective sentences to describe the insanity that is inherent to the BAU’s job. She loathes that it exists, on a deeply visceral level. 

Two hours in is also when Spencer comes by her desk with his fourth coffee and a second, having turned in all of his field reports and no doubt starting on the eternal backlog of consults and second opinions he picked at random from JJ’s desk. Sometimes she swears she hates him. Not a lot. Just a tiny tiny bit of hate, too keep things interesting.

“They're showing _Solaris_ this weekend,” he says as if it makes perfect sense as a conversation opener. “The original, in the theatres. You want to go?” 

Emily closes the folder over the page she was writing, concentration gone. “Did Morgan put you up to this?”

“What?” 

“Did Morgan tell you to distract me?”

“No, Morgan would have no idea what "Solaris" is.” Spencer looks almost insulted and he hides it badly with a frown and a sip of his coffee. “Well, I mean, the original one's in Russian, so, really, you and I are the only ones that can really enjoy it.”

“Isn't _Solaris_ like four hours long?” She realizes the tactical mistake as soon as the words leave her lips. A question is a sign of interest and if the cinema had scheduled this last month when the world was still moving around the proper axis she would have gone. Now all she feels is the pull of her own fear and the counterweight of the casual masks she has to keep up.

“It's five. The best Sci-Fi meditation film of all time. You want to go with me?” 

“Sorry, handsome. I'm gonna have to pass.” She tries to make the blow as soft as she can. It still dims the joy in Spencer’s eyes, even as he shrugs it off as not a problem at all. He’s almost apologizing for having bothered her by asking, falling back on bully survival skills. He knows damn well he’s doing it too.

Emily might hate his bureaucratic kung-fu, but she doesn’t want to hurt him so she asks about the movie and lets him happily summarize the experience of the entire movie. To his credit, he condenses it into just shy of two hours, which of itself is both a kindness and some sort of record.

She takes Friday off and flies to New York. A bit of shopping, a meeting with her financial advisor in an office so high and stark it only means she’s damn good at keeping track of her own investment. She has options and bug out plans. Fail-safes. It doesn't make her feel as good as it should.

She comes back to DC late on Sunday night, settling back into the rain muffled city. She is tired, bone-tired, body-tired from travel and walking around in the city. The muscle aches are grounding and she welcomes them as such, though she looks forward to sleeping in her own bed and smelling of her own soap. She climbs up the stairs to stretch out the stiffness of the drive, alone with her breath and her steps in the hallway. 

The door closest to the stairs opens on cue. Emily has never figured out what schedule Sheryl keeps. Maybe she lives by that door, keeping watch. Two weeks ago she would have considered it excessive. Now she can’t find it in her to blame the woman. 

The apartment greets her with empty familiarity. The cash is gone from the envelope on the entry table and she makes a note to stop by an ATM to refill it. The cleaning service is worth it, keeping up with chores she has no pretense of being able to tackle on her own. The scheduling alone would be a nightmare.

She sits at the dining table that came with the apartment — it has too many chairs for her use — and tries to decide if she’s hungry enough to break into the emergency snacks. The black cat she adopted on impulse after a nightmare case jumps on her lap with a loud disappointed purr after being ignored. 

“Sergio!” she exclaims as she digs her fingers eagerly into the soft black fur. “Serge, you scared me. Where you been?” She pauses, registering what feels wrong about the cat. “Why are you wet?” 

Emily stands and grabs for a weapon, dropping the indignant cat to the floor. She scans the rooms one by one in a sweep pattern, chattering sweet nonsense to cover the renewed fear that grips her heart.

“Were you out running around in the rain?” The kitchen is clear, nothing out of place or looking like it got used, ever.

“I sure did miss you, Sergio. “ Clears the bathroom.

“You're just the handsomest kitten I've ever seen.” Living room.

“I sure miss you when I'm gone.” She opens the bedroom, the last place left to check but there is no one waiting behind the door. Nothing but the rustle of open curtains where the fire escape has been pried open and is letting in the cold night air and the scent of rain over the city. “Is this how you got out, buddy?” she asks the cat, genuinely this time. She considers calling Brianna, to lie to herself if nothing else. She’d almost be willing to believe it.

Instead, Emily closes the window and balances beautiful and breakable perfume bottles on the seam. She packs a suitcase with the things she’d miss: a few outfits, weapons, the content of the safe. She pulls the console table against the door and balances a vase she remembers picking up when she first moved in on the edge of the table. One by one she closes the lights and — gun gripped tight — she settles on a chair facing the door.

It’s not paranoia if the monster is really out to get you.

* * *

## 2002

The Interpol offices are strange in a way Emily can’t place at first. It’s something in the way the office spaces share the same finishes as the public-facing ones. She has grown used to the highly polished granite of Langley giving way to dust-impregnated cubicles in greige carpet lining. Interpol is open spaces under rows of neon lights and desks assembled back to back to facilitate cooperation. Different purposes being expressed in business furnishing and HR doctrine. The periphery of the floor is lined with closed offices and conference rooms, natural light blocked here and there by swaying ivory blinds. 

In a very similar way, she is not quite sure what she makes of Clyde. The man is effusive and sarcastic, greeting her with a kiss on the cheek and barb she thinks was meant to be gentle. Emily isn't sure if that is because he is Interpol or because he is French. She figures she will know soon: only one of those labels should rub off on her.

"There's coffee here and a kettle if you're more into tea, just start a fresh pot whenever it's low. People get… unpleasant when it's left empty." He points at a table as he speaks, dusted with torn sugar packets and haunted by the last swallow of coffee reheating into a lukewarm bio-weapon at the bottom of the carafe.

"You have met Sean, yes?" Clyde asks as he turns to her. Emily nods, she had met Sean at the airport, he'd given her a ride to her hotel. "Pretty boy over there is Jeremy Wolff and this lovely person—" He drops his hands on the woman's shoulders as he speaks, squeezing briefly. "—is Tsia. Get to know each other, read the files and whatnot. We're all going out for a drink tonight to get properly acquainted. That wasn't a suggestion, by the way, it is a fact. We're going to spend a lot of time working as a team and I want the awkward phase over and done with ASAP."

"Is he always this bossy?" Emily asks with a wink.

"Only when he gets to put his drinks on an expense report," Tsia answers with a laugh.

"Things are simply better when the government pays for it," Clyde answers with a shake of his head. "Get our newest recruit settled, will you?" 

Tsia stands when he leaves, extending her hand. "Tsia Mosley."

"Emily Prentiss," Emily answers automatically as she shakes her hand. "Which desk can I take?"

"This one's free. I will go get you a laptop and we can start pushing you through IT to get you functional."

"I thought my clearance was sent ahead of my transfer?"

"I am sure it was," Tsia answers with a dismissive wave of her hand. "But expecting things to actually work is… adorable. I hope you like hard copies, the record is a month for onboarding."

"Standard operating procedures everywhere."

"Pretty much."

Emily chuckles. Universal truths follow every organization, with no regard to country or allegiance. She sits at the desk, fiddling with the chair and drawers as Tsia steps away on her technological errands. Hurried footsteps and the sibilance of whispers make her look up, part curiosity, part human nature, large part drilled in training. She watches as Clyde and Sean hurry to a conference room as Jeremy all but runs to open the door leading to the staircase. High-rank visit, she thinks. Someone who could ruin their day. Or career.

She is expecting a sharp suit and polished Oxfords, so the man that follows Jeremy leaves her reeling. He is covered in what she can only assume is an arsenal, better suited to a warzone than past several layers of security into an office. Knives strapped to his thighs in tactical holsters, pistols at his waist, and indeterminate bulges under the black leather jacket he is wearing. He looks around the room, eyes unreadable beneath tinted lenses, but Emily shivers as she feels the weight of that glance pass over her. Then he walks into the conference room and closes the door behind him.

"Who was _that_?" She asks Tsia, shaking out of the surprise.

"Trouble," Tsia answers as she drops a messenger bag and laptop on Emily's desk. "I saw the look, but trust me you don't want a piece of that action."

"Does "trouble" have a name?"

"He answers to Soldier. Jenny from accounting managed to prompt him into giving a last name, Barnes."

"Ok, so why is Mr. Barnes in a meeting with our team leader?"

Tsia shrugged. "Intel. Field deployment. We'll know more once we can confirm his data. Don't know who his primary source is — or who signs his paycheck — but some of our best stings were based on his reports."

"He is not Interpol?"

Tsia snorts. "Come on. I know you've got eyes. He's a ghost. There's a betting pool going; Jeremy holds the cash if you want in."

Emily isn't sure how she feels about this development. Not that the CIA ran above board in any capacity, but she had expected differently. She shrugs and lets the tension settle to a simmer at the back of her brain. Getting inside the head of terrorists was the job, strange bedfellows were the expected price to pay.


	2. Circling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A lot of the dialogue is lifted from season 6 episodes and slightly scrambled.

## 2011

If the hotel had been in any city but DC it would have been fine. As it is, it only irks Emily: the sheets and mattress are wrong, the alarm too loud and the carpet foreign under her feet. Sergio howls from the bathroom offended at the strange smells and break in routine. Emily can only commiserate. She’s grabbed only the essential as she abandoned the apartment that would never again be home. A go-bag with work-appropriate clothes - thank you BAU for never letting that habit fade - the content of the safe that had laid dormant in her bedroom, and her guns. The weapons had taken the second-longest to gather from their various hidden compartments. 

"I know Sergio, I am the most cruel mother that ever lived," she said as she cracked the bathroom door open. "But you're gonna have to trust me on this, ok?"

The cat is most unimpressed, mollified by treats and scratching a storm as she corralled him back into the carrier. Practice makes perfect, costing her less time and less blood this time around. She drops the room key at the counter, starts the rental car from the relative safety of the lobby. She breathes easier when the motor turns over without incidents. Bombs aren't Ian's style or hadn't been. But many things can change with time as grudges settle.

Driving to Garcia's easy enough with GPS prompts. Penelope is waiting outside in a flurry of glittery flowers and concern by the time Emily pulls up to the curb.

"Thank you so much for saying yes at the last minute," Emily says as she exits the car.

"Oh no. Not at all. Hotch said you called in some personal time, but he didn't mention anything else. Are you alright?"

"I am fine," she lies as pride and sorrow fight for her heart. Garcia might not be a profiler according to human resources but she sure has absorbed enough through osmosis to be formidable. She hands over the hissing plastic crate to the other woman. "Family matters. I'll be back as soon as I can. You won't have time to get too annoyed by Mr. Grumpypants here, hopefully."

"How could I? He is such a pretty boy." The vibrating thrills of their phones give her pause. For a moment Penelope's happy mask slips to distress and genuine concern. "Looks like he'll have plenty of time to get used to the apartment."

"Send the team my love?" 

"On it!" Garcia beams at her. "And if you need us, just call ok? Whatever it is. we'll help. You don't have to do everything on your own."

Emily nods and dodges away into the car. Formidable by any measure. She hopes her bluff was enough.

Traffic is hell and she barely makes it back to town for her late lunch meeting. It feels very much contrived: the burner phone left in a newspaper and the meeting in a shared space yet avoiding eye contact. It is a risk, it exposes them to whoever would be trailing her if she was being watched. But it makes Clyde feel better to be playing by his rules so she sits on the bench and waits for the call. 

"I was beginning to think you weren't coming." Tsia's voice on the phone is small and the poor speaker quality does little to distort the pain. So, because it's the thing to do, she asks.

"What happened to Jeremy?"

"You know what I had planned for today? Cake tasting. Instead, his mother is greeting visitors at a funeral." 

“I am so sorry, Tsia,” Emily says and she means it. She wants to drop the pretense and cross the plaza to go hold her, so her friend doesn’t have to grieve alone.

Tsia takes a deep, shaky breath. "Well, that's the problem with marrying a member of your own team. One of you is a target, so is the other. I get it."

"Hello, darling." Clyde jumps on the call with his honeyed voice. Choosing a moment to redirect the emotional undertow. Subtle manipulation is and always was his calling card. 

"All right, let's make this quick." Emily wants out of the open space and out of the reminiscence of her past, as necessary at both are.

"How many times do I have to tell you? I'm not quick about anything." Clyde lets the innuendo linger on the line. It's comforting, old jokes and banter.

"I don't know. What about that time I blew my cover in Prague?" Emily asks. "You took out that sentry before I could even draw my weapon. You saved my ass, Clyde." 

"I'm surprised you remember the little people from your Interpol days now that you're a posh FBI profiler." That one burns. The jab isn't entirely about the job he helped her get.

"What's being done to locate Doyle?" she tries to steer them back to business. 

"Only every agency in the Northern hemisphere is looking for him." The flippancy is the answer. There is too much Red Tape, too many bureaucratic behemoths to have a response agile enough to save them. Every agency would love to have the bragging rights about avenging the fallen, but that is as fast they can move. 

Emily doesn’t particularly want her picture on a plaque at the BAU. "What are **we** doing to find him?" 

“My contact at DCRI tracked one of Doyle's aliases leaving France the day after Jeremy's murder.” Tsia cuts in, her voice firm now that she is talking as the agent and not the person. “He took a commercial flight to Beijing, then doubled back on a train bound for Berlin. But when GSG 9 intercepted it, he was already gone.” 

Emily pictures the route round the globe, too tortuous with too much doubling back. Ian never headed back west, not when he could continue east towards his real target.“I think it's safe to assume he's coming here.” 

“Why is he doing this?” 

“Why do you think? We put him away.” The team, the agency put Doyle away. But Emily was the one to betray Ian and break his heart. Her cell phone, the real one, beeps with text messages alerts. 

“Duty calls?” Clyde asks in a light tone as if they were having nothing but a friendly catching chat. He drops it like a switch being flicked off as he continues. “I know what you're thinking. Absolutely not. Your team isn't under oath. They don't have clearance.” 

“They could help.” She answers on autopilot. There’s no way Clyde knew about her suddenly work-free agenda. She’s not sure the ink has dried on the forms yet. The text messages aren’t from the team anyway. They are from Sheryl, two photos and a time of delivery. The box is a local florist. She knows before the second image loads that it’ll be a lilac freesia. 

“How?” Tsia asks. “We don't even know where Doyle is. Involving them at this point would be premature. And reckless.” 

“Leave it to Tsia and I. You go be with your team.” 

Except she can’t. She can’t be a liability to them on a case, she can’t drag them out into this mess she thought she’d buried in a past life. “Even in hiding Doyle can't resist extravagance,” she says at last. “Track the money.” 

“I will. Trust me,” Clyde says.

“I don’t trust anyone anymore,” Emily replies matter of factly. She hangs up and tosses the phone as she walks away. In her mind, the seed of an idea whispers “That’s not quite true.” She’ll need a new, clean, phone.

* * *

It is evening before she goes out again. The sunless grey of the day bled into a lead coloured night, cold with the kind of humidity that seeps through the wool of her coat and the wrought iron of the chair. She picked the location in defiance. She loves the way it overlooks the Congress House with its marble extravagances highlighted by sodium lights. How it opens to a place of law and rules when the meeting she’s expecting has nothing to do with either.

She puts down both of the take-out coffee mugs, the thin waxed cardboard in a losing battle against the chill. It's the thought that counts. The little gestures of civility.

Emily hears him before she sees him, that much isn’t a surprise. What surprises her is how warm his hand is on her shoulder, pressing almost like a caress before he walks over to take the empty chair. How much she has to fight against leaning into that touch, how much she misses it when it’s gone. She thought she’d written over those pieces of herself. 

“I knew you were watching me,” Emily says, because it’s what’s expected, the first step in this dance. 

“What's the expression? Keeps your friends close, your enemies under surveillance?” He sits and leans back, relaxed, claiming the space with his body as much as his charisma. He looks older, thinner than she remembers. 

“I've been here for two hours. You should know better than to keep a lady waiting.”

“It seems hypocritical, seeing as I had to wait seven years.”

“Hello, Ian.” She can’t help the fondness that creeps into her voice. 

“Hello, Lauren. Oh, wait. Lauren Reynolds died in a car accident, didn't she?” There is nothing soft in his tone when he answers.

“What do you want?” 

“You.” He waits, reading her expression. She knows she failed at guarding her reaction when he continues. He could always read her “Oh, not today. Don't worry about that. But soon.”

“I've got a Glock levelled at your crotch.” She tilts her head, her gloved hand squeezing the reassuring weight of the gun under the table. Her heart is beating hard and fast enough that her fingers have gone from numb and nearly frozen to almost burning. Pulling the trigger would be nothing but a twitch, a muscle memory, barely a thought. “What's to stop me from taking you and the little ones out right now?”

“You'd never make it back to your car and you know it.” She tunes him out as he lists her team and how human, how vulnerable they are. She tunes out the words that are meant to hurt, the obvious bait to get a rise of anger and emotion, to make her slip up. She listens instead for the things he doesn’t say. She listens to the lack of any mention of Tsia and Clyde. Of any reference to agencies instead of people. Ian thinks the former is already dealt with, in time, and isn’t concerned about the latter. He is too well connected, is owed too many favours from too many people. Valhalla had always been about bringing down the untouchable. 

“Come near my team and I will end you.” She holsters the gun, picks up the empty coffee cup. No sense in littering. She stands to walk away, makes all of three steps before he speaks up. He barely raises his voice, knows that it will reach her.

“I don't have a quarrel with them. How long that remains the case depends entirely on you. They're innocent. You are not. “

Emily squares her shoulder and walks away, the hair at the back of her neck standing on end from unknown observers. She is exposed and alone and, again, she runs. She walks and walks and walks until her feet are blisters and pain and she’s doubled back enough that she’s certain she’s lost her trail. She hails a cab and goes back to the hotel. She’ll have to move, in the morning. 

* * *

## 2004

The training room is far too fancy. A Gothic-styled stained glass windows spawn an entire wall, up two generous stories, tinting the light blue and breaking it in arcs and shadows across the space. The floor is hardwood with inlays in different essences drawing geometric patterns. It had not always been a gym. It wasn't a use that suited the room, by modern standards. Too hard, too empty, void of modern equipment. To Bucky, it’s perfect.

He enjoys the way the sound echoes around them as they move. Emily blocks the diagonal witik with one stick than two, well above her head and grunts with the effort. He switches to a horizontal slash and smiles when she dodges with a step. When they started training she would try to block every blow, leaving herself open and winded, even if he didn’t put any real strength in his movement. Neither of them could take the safety-foam weapons seriously and even in the hands of a moderately unfit person, a properly snapped stick could and would break bones. Emily is very fit, and he doesn’t need an edge to be deadly. He just prefers it. 

He breaks the pattern because she’s good enough now to step out of the strict cadence of angles he’s drilled into her from the beginning. Instead of a slash in the opposite direction, he drops to one knee and brings up his left hand in a diagonal aimed at her hip. She backs away to gain enough space to block the blow but he’s already up on the ball of his feet, bringing down a hit at the crown from his right hand. She blocks it and rolls away with the momentum, ducking low and curling away from the follow-up slash at her neck. Her recovery is not bad but it leaves her unbalanced as she tries to press the attack with a circular slash toward his throat. He leans back to kick the stick away, bringing his own momentum into a two-handed diagonal strike down. She blocks it with both her hands, shuffling back from the reverberation of the impact in her shoulders. A breath, two, she’s stretching back and bouncing on her feet, smiling.

“Finally decided to stop handling me with kids glove?” she says in a tease.

He snorts. “You don’t want that.”

“Oh, but what if I did?” 

Bucky has a thing for small punky things that can take a beating. Always had since Brooklyn. So he smiles as he winds his arm for a circular attack, metal arm flashing in the broken light. She moves to block, as he knew she would. “You’d have to show me you could handle it,” he says even as he’s sinking to his knees, a controlled descent into a tight spiral. She looks at him surprised as the drop leaves him resting the tip of his right stick lightly against her stomach, an inch inch below the sternum. It’s a killing blow and they both know it, whether it’d be through the diaphragm or down to messy disembowelment. She’s as slow to lower her arms as he is to rise from his knees to his feet, never breaking eye contact. Just as slowly, he brings up the stick to boop her nose twice. 

The outrage on her face at this is everything he expected and more. He knows he’s smiling too widely, can feel it in his cheeks and at the corner of his eyes but he can’t help it. She’s adorable when provoked. Her attacks loose finesse for the first two passes, whaling at his general direction, only passably angled by muscle memory. He swats them away then starts dancing around her, stepping out of range at the last second. She tries to rush after him and he bends backward to arc under an overextended slash. Emily gasps in outrage as he blocks the blow to his knees without looking, as well as the flurry that follows. He pushes her back with a two-handed blow and uses the movement to launch into a roundhouse kick. She surprises him, mimicking his previous move to bend under her leg.

Bucky takes pity and allows Emily to hide her staggering from the dodge by circling around her. He takes two steps and, because he’s in a good mood, pushes into a hands-free cartwheel to land at her back. She turns to face him and he blocks her blow in an easy guard.

“Show off.” Her outstretched arm is shaking a bit, her training clothes clinging to her sweat-drenched skin as do the hair that escaped her ponytail. 

“Only a little bit.” He winks. He’s smiling still but it’s ok. Emily wouldn’t ruin his reputation over it. Besides, it’s not like anyone would believe her if she told. 

She lunges forward with her right hand, aiming either at his nose or eye and the indecision is something he’d have to address with her eventually. Even in sparring, got for the real thing. He pushes the strike away, rotating his own stick to cage her weapons against herself and very deliberately turns his right wrist inward until he can tap her nose again.

“Boop. Boop.” 

Emily snarls, but Bucky can tell the rattan sticks are heavy now, her movement less fluid as the muscles protest. He lets her charge and charge, stepping away until she stumbles instead of stepping forward, spinning with the weight of her blow. He shoves her with his shoulder, hard enough that she falls but not enough to break ribs. She stutters and absorbs the fall into a roll. 

“Ok ok, enough,” she whispers with the last of her air, sticks rattling on the floor around her. She grunts and paws at her hair to remove the tie, letting it drape on the floor like a dark halo. The silence is filled by the sounds of her breath then quietly, slowly, not even that. 

Bucky goes to get water bottles, sealed, and rolls one gently towards her. She grabs it and presses the plastic against her neck and forehead. He leans on one of the columns, sipping his own water.

"How is this cold?” she asks, sitting up to crack the cap and drain half of the bottle. “Scratch that, how did you even find this place?"

Bucky shrugs. "People like me."

A scoff. "Right. Who did you terrify?"

“Hey! I can be nice.” 

“Ok, yeah, you _can_ be.” She flops back down, gazing up at the ceiling. He follows her gaze, over the votive candle stand, up to the balcony and the dangling art-deco pendants in reds and orange and to the other stained glass windows, mostly hidden from where she lies. Ghosts of colours, maybe. “I’ll miss this,” she says after a while.

“Quitting on me? But you’re so close to earning a real sword.” With another trainer, she’d have moved on already. Any other pupil would have told him to fuck off a long time ago.

Emily turns to face him, propping her head up on her hand, elbow against the floor. “Clyde’s got an assignment for me.”

He waits for her to continue. Not that he doesn’t have questions, he has plenty and a lot of them about things he doesn’t, on paper, have the clearance to know. But the best way to both protect his own vastness of shadowy dealings and to get Emily to talk is to wait. She’ll volunteer information, but will clam up at the faintest hint of interrogation.

“It’s a field assignment, undercover.”

“How long?”

“Hard to say. As long as it needs, probably.”

"Humm," Bucky hums-grunt under his breath. He doesn’t like it, but nothing he says will make her back down.

“What? Think I can’t handle fieldwork?”

“Nope. I think the field can’t handle you.” He sighs, fishing around his pockets for a card. It’s slightly damp and the paper has been creased until it’s velvety soft. “I don’t like undercover work. For it to work you need to become the legend the handlers built. It’s very easy for that persona to… to become overwhelming.” He crosses the three steps between them and lowers himself to his knees, sitting against his heels. “Getting in is hard. Getting out is...”

“Harder?”

He shakes his head. “Messy.” He presses the card into her hand. “Plus from what I’ve seen Sean’s weakness is extraction. If things turn sour, if you need an out, skip the red tape. Call that number.”

“And what? You’ll send the cavalry? I say the passcode and suddenly I will be rescued?”

“Something like that. And no. Just call. You don’t have to say anything if you can’t.”

“Thanks.” There’s something stormy in her eyes, hard to read. He’s touched a nerve but he doesn’t go digging. She doesn’t throw the card away, so there’s always that. 

“Call even if it turns into a false alarm. There’s… there’s no gain in saving something for an absolutely-worst-case scenario.”

“I will.”

“Promise?”

“I will,” she repeats. 


	3. Take Down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some more dialogue lifted from the show and then we start going off canon in earnest.

## 2011

Emily's steps echo around her. The heeled boots are a calculated risk. They would slow her down in a dead run, but they are giving her a sense of normality. Right now she is clinging to that. The parking is mostly empty, the cars older and more worn down at this time of day: security and maintenance crew instead of office workers with career synergy to display. 

The door is unlocked and no one stops her as she gets to the elevator. 

The roof is crowded with life, even if none of it is human. Urban farming stretches rows of leafy greens and the barren remains of tomato plants in neatly divided sections. There’s a sitting area but Emily walks past it and into the greenhouse, the one that shouldn’t be open to the public. There is nothing eco-conscious or edible in there. The warm humid air makes her choke after the cold of the evening air. There are orchid vines and ferns spilling out around her as she walks, alone with the rustling of leaves she cannot identify.. The stone path winds slowly around the space like a lazy river. Light catches on the stones, tricking her brain into thinking they are wet from some artificial rain. But her soles don’t slip and betray the clever varnish for what it is. There are two chairs at the end of the path, where it curls up into a snail’s shell. Beyond the glass panes, she watches the city’s light flicker on as the teal and blues of the sky fade. The spotlight of the federate core competing with the new technology of the Triskelion by the water. 

“It’s so tacky,” she says out loud. 

“Of course it is. It’s where they want you to look,” the shadow answers as he steps forward. “Fury is too good at his job to have allowed for anything less and the gaudiest bauble as misdirection.”

“Expensive tactic. The construction contract was a beast.” She turns to face him. She has no idea if he was already here when she walked in or if he followed her. She doesn’t know which scenario she prefers. “So where are the real secrets hidden?” 

He smiles at that like a Cheshire cat but doesn’t answer. “I’m glad you called,” he says instead.

“I’m sorry it took me so long to do it?” Her voice cracks at the end. Then she is being held in a way that’s familiar and safe. The tension she’s been carrying since Vegas, since Sean, breaks. With a hitch and a garbled noise, she buries her face into the expanse of his shoulder and cries.

Bucky holds her close and hums as he rocks a bit on his heels. The movement makes her sway, draws her into his orbit as easily as it used to, in that other life she had thought she’d left behind. He doesn’t shush her or lie about everything being alright. It’s not alright. It will be, but they still need to talk about that.

“I didn’t know if you’d pick up. It’s been so long,” she says when the tears stop and she’d only gasping dry breaths. The leather of his tactical outfit is smeared with snot and she gently pushes herself away. 

“Of course I would. Do you think I give a permanent way to reach me to just everyone?”

“Didn’t know I was that special.” 

He scoffs, mock insulted, and guides her gently to one of the chairs. Emily wipes at her eyes, trying to rebuild some pretense of control, if only for herself. The cast iron of the chair is warm from having soaked up the sun all day.

“How’s work?” she asks

“I get around a lot less than I used to. Then again, they found the one commanding officer I’ll actually listen to.” He sits in the other chair, sprawling a bit since he’s too tall and too massive for the dainty design. He looks out of the greenhouse window and over at the Triskelion with a small, soft, smile on his face. “It’s been fun.”

“How is Steve?”

“Adapting. It’s slow going, but he’s getting there.”

“Have you told him about what you’ve been up to?” She leaves the details unspoken so he can draw his own conclusion. She isn’t sure herself if she means Bucky’s specific target selection pattern when he used to work as an asset to any intelligence agency who would have him, or their own history together. Maybe both. 

“Nah. I will when he asks, but not yet. There’s a few loose ends I need to clean up first.” His hand trails to one of his knives, flicking it between his fingers. The matte black blade is almost invisible in the growing darkness of the garden.

“I’m messing things up, aren’t I? Am I gonna make the OP you have on go sideways?”

He turns his head to look at her. “Do you need me to overthrow a small African kingdom? Because that would require me making some provision if only so we don't end up with a very prissy Brooklyn punk on our tails. Anything short of that, you’re good.”

Emily laughs. It sounds broken, her throat is still raw from crying, but she laughs at the image. She’s fought too long and too hard against going into politics to become a regent now. 

“I have no need for a country, thank you.”

“Good. Coups get messy. So tell me, who do I need to shoot?” Something must have shown on her face because he snorts and continues. “You don’t need an out, your life’s good Em. And I have a very _specific_ set of skills. If you call _me_ , there’s someone with a bullet to their name. So who is it?”

Emily reaches into her pocket slowly. Partly out of reluctance, partly out of reinforced training not to startle the polytraumatized, lethal, threat assessing parts of Bucky’s brain. She knows he won’t hurt her on purpose, but her nerves are frayed enough to scream for an excess of caution. She brings her hand up between them, opening her fist to show what she has carried for far too long. The chain is heavy as it falls from her fingers. The gimmel ring glints in the last of the light, swaying like a pendulum. Indecisive. 

“Ah.” Metal clicks on metal as Bucky reaches and gently plucks the necklace from her grasp. "About time."

Emily hums in answer. Maybe he's right. She feels lighter.

* * *

The Soldier learned to fly the hard way: with the promise of more pain for any failure and the sorry states of technology after the war. He still has ghost pains in his left leg from a bad break that was left to fester as punishment for having had the audacity to jostle his handler in an emergency landing. But Bucky -- Bucky loves the quinjets. He turns to Emily, smiling, and stops at the utter doubt her entire face is broadcasting.

“You’re going to _fly_ us to Boston.” 

“Last I remember, you don’t like my driving.”

“There’s such a thing as too much creative license.” She bites at the edge of a nail, worrying at the flesh there too. “But isn’t this a bit much? I mean S.H.I.E.L.D. is bound to realize they’re missing a… how much are these things worth?”

“More money than you really want to consider. And no, this one went AWOL a few years back, got written off the inventory. ”

“You believe that?” 

“No. But I believe even Fury needs to have plausible deniability. There are things the spymaster would rather not know, so he doesn’t have to lie about it.”

“I’m not so sure about that.” She tears out the piece of nail, purposefully puts her hand back down. “And you’re sure he’s back in Boston? He was here just a few days ago.”

“Which is why he didn’t stay. He’s putting in some facetime, making sure the right people know he’s back and very much in charge.

“You got all that in one day?” She raises an eyebrow, in disbelief and challenge.

“You think I ever let that thread grow cold? After…” he lets the past go unsaid between them. “I’ve kept an eye on his people. It wasn’t hard. I knew where to look.”

“Why didn’t you uproot them before?”

“Doyle’s wasn’t my head to take.” He looks at her, waiting for her to nod. 

Bucky’s been careful so he knows that she doesn’t know exactly what he’s been up to for a decade. How he’d learned to pull strings with any number of abbreviated agencies as a freelancer, as a modern ronin, waging his one-man crusade. Hydra’s been bleeding hard and fast since he walked away into a blizzard, somewhere near Тайга. He’s erased himself from their records, purged every medical file, every picture, and mission report. Made himself a ghost. If he’s siphoned some of their money along the way, that was only back pay, long overdue.

He knows a lot, about facing your monsters, and about waiting for the time being right to do so. He looks at the quinjet and sighs. S.H.I.E.L.D. is going to be finicky to bring down. It’s not something he’s going to be able to break into pieces. It’s going to be loud and messy. And he’ll need to tell Steve. He’ll need to tell Stevie a lot of things he has no desire to verbalize. 

He also knows she’s too good of a profiler not to have several educated guesses she’s been politely keeping to herself. 

“Okay. But—” whatever she was going to say gets cut by the ring of her cellphone. Emily at least has the good sense of looking embarrassed. “Sorry. Work phone, I’m supposed to have it on at all times…” she mumbles as she digs the offending device out of her purse. 

Bucky raises an eyebrow and gesture, as sarcastically as he can, for her to take her time. She puts the phone on speaker with an apologetic shrug. 

“Hello?”

“ _Hey Prentiss, I’m sorry if I’m intruding, Hotch said you were taking some personal time_.”

“It’s fine Morgan, what do you need?”

Bucky mentally flips through the BAU rooster. SSA Derek Morgan. Brash with a soft heart. He’d get along with Steve and compete with Sam. He's Emily's family, like the rest of her team. Which is why Emily's pulled her operative mask on, steeled her voice into an affected value of normal. It shouldn't translate as strange on the phone, but it hurts Bucky to see. She's running herself to shreds to shield her team.

" _We're looking into a new case. Hits disguised as murder-suicides and arson_."

"Sounds like pros.”

" _Yeah. One of them got shot by his own team when we came a bit too close to interrupting them. Not ideal but at least we have a lead. A lead straight overseas_."

"So you want me to get in touch with my Interpol contacts."

" _Yes. Garcia followed the money, we need to know if they have anything on an Ian Doyle_."

Bucky wonders what would have happened if she'd been alone. What part of herself she would have sacrificed to stay up even as the blood drained from her limbs. He could hear the adrenaline drunk beat of her heart, roaring for a fight/flight/freeze response. Nothing would have changed he guesses. She would have fought, after having picked flight so many times.

Now, she only lies. Takes a deep breath to regain her footing. "Sure. Can you send me your vics' names? It might help."

Now, she doesn't have to face it alone. He moves to stand behind her, cat silent. She leans against his chest, with a thankful smile as she closes her eyes. 

" _Prentiss, is everything alright with you?_ "

“I’m fine, why?”

“ _Come on, I can tell, something’s wrong. It’s not like you to skip a case like this and not even ask if we need you to come in_.”

“I’m overdue a vacation, you said it yourself, Morgan.”

He can’t blame him for not swallowing that line. Vacation in the common sense isn’t something they do, not people like them. Inaction, watching the sunset over the waves of one ocean or another, that was for healing. For licking your wounds when you couldn’t take more. It wasn’t something you went out to seek. Bucky leans down until he can press his chin against the top of her hair. She smells of cheap hotel shampoo and underneath it layers of fear. 

“ _You know, Emily, you really need to trust people._ ”

“I trust people.”

 _“No, you don't. You don't because you can't. And I get it. Every time you tried to count on someone, they'd let you down, so you go it alone. You'll never admit that because you're just too damn stubborn.”_ He pauses. Maybe regretting the harshness of the words. He wouldn’t know what parts were wrong and what part hit too close to a nerve, but he has enough self-awareness to know he’s crossed a line. _“It's all right. It doesn't really matter. But I'll tell you what does matter… that you can trust me, Emily. With anything. I'm serious. No matter how awful you think it is, I promise you, you are not alone. I just wish you'd believe that._ ”

“I do.” Emily says under her breath and the hand that’s not holding the phone reaches out to grab Bucky’s hand and she squeezes as hard as she can. He snakes his other arm around her torso to hold her in a half embrace. 

“ _What’s that?_ ”

“I said I do. I believe that I’m not alone. But I have to go, Morgan. I’ll let you know if I hear back from my contacts.” 

She hangs up and sags against his chest as the air leaves her lungs. Bucky picks the phone from her hands gently and pries it apart, unhooking the battery and ejecting the SIM card with the flick of a finger.

"Families. He's in DC killing the families of the agents that worked that sting." Her voice is high pitched, breathing too hard with the panic beneath the words. "He's gonna go after my team."

"No, he won't." He brings his right arm, still holding her hand, across her chest to hold her firmly. He presses both of their palms against her shoulder. "His _people_ are killing families but he wants you for himself. It's personal. So let's go give him the hell he deserves."

She nods, weakly. The fear is burning itself out. He is familiar with that strain of exhaustion but it will serve them now, allow for clearer thinking.

“Do you want to go to them?” 

“No.” She pulls away, wipes at her face. He ignores the edges of tears in her eyes and the smear in her makeup. All he’s done is make her cry and though he knows he’s not to blame that knowledge sits uneasily. “I’m not letting you have all the fun.”

* * *

This is a part of the plan he hadn’t agreed on. Emily had insisted so he’d let her lead on: this is her hunt after all. In her own way, she is shielding him, he knows that much. Her team will be coming for her, as backup or as avenging badge-wilding long-arms-of-the-law. She’s leaving a credible trail for them to follow. To obfuscate that for all intent and purposes this really is a hit on a specific individual. And that she already knew where to find him. 

He scans the street through the scope, rooftop gravel shifting beneath him. There’s no one, a ghost town in the heart of the night. Uneasy, he realizes that (once again) he’s gotten used to New York City and its bustling, hustling, insomniac heart. Having a home is dangerous. It’s a weakness that can be taken from you. 

Soldier very deliberately does not switch to infrareds as he sweeps back to the car. There’s no movement, the windows’ tint is acting as designed and shielding the interior. He knows Emily is fidgeting because Stark’s communicators are a notch too sensitive to ambient noise. To Tony’s defence, he filters his own — and the team’s — through the fine mesh of J.A.R.V.I.S.’ judgement. They weren’t designed to be used once jailbroken and out on the street. 

“Stop biting your nails,” he says, low in his chest so the sound dies before it passes the barrier of his forearm. There’s no answer, but the fabric rustles once, stops.

The door of the bar opens, spilling out a jumble of voices, music, and, at last, their Target. The Target walks toward the car with the steady stumbling slant of a career drunk and the swagger of a small man thinking he made it big.

He gets in the car with the jingle of keys and the satisfying dry metal grind of an engine that fails to start.

_"Battery's dead, Fahey."_

_"Jeez. Lauren."_

She’s said three words and the target has gotten a glimpse of her in the shadows through the rearview mirror, and yet there is no hesitation, just pure recognition through a rapidly sobering haze. Soldier shudders. How much of a lasting impression had Lauren made on this man, the smallest cog on the way to bigger and better things? How much of an impression elsewhere? Flashy, memorable, and everything that he feels goes against his very core. Soldier is easily twice Emily’s size, and yet she is the one whose very presence reshapes the world. 

_“How many men does Doyle have, Jack?”_

The target tries to fib and answer and she cocks the gun. It echoes in the chamber of the car because it speaks the language of survival instincts. In most people that tends to smooth things over. Steve has been, bless his soul, trying to remind Soldier that he used to have those instincts too. It’s almost adorable. The target spills his guts easily, giving Emily the intel she wants as she questions him in clipped sentences. 

Noise from the bar draws his attention, but it’s only a couple making their way out into the night with giggling, wandering hands. A shift in tone makes him refocus on the car. 

“ _... Lauren, how about you do me a favour, huh, you ease up on that gun, ok? I helped you and Clyde back in the day. I can help you now. Do you want to know where Doyle is?_ ” 

He wonders if she caught it, the slip of the tongue. It might be nothing. It might have been the first in a series of sloppy loose threads that led to this night and to all the nights she’s lost to this fear. 

“I already do.” Her voice has gone small. She caught it. Soldier also catches that finality in that sentence, the ebb and flow of a situation coming to a definite close. He folds the bipod and packs up, masking his outline as he heads to the street. 

_“Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait!”_

The shot echoes, muzzle flair not quite hidden by the tinted windows. Emily walks, doesn’t run, up to him a corner away. 

“Satisfied?” he asks as they cross the alley to the mid-range rental car waiting for them. It’ll have to be wiped down before it's returned. 

“Yeah. GSW and his rap sheet should work as a trail, throw them off your scent.”

“Them who?” He waits until she fastens her seatbelt. “Doyle’s? Or your team?”

“Oh stop looking so smug and just drive.”

“Yes ma’am.”

They strike the next night. Doyle holds court at the Black Shamrock, the same as he did before he was caught and sent away. It is an arrogant display of confidence and a taunt. The man is too smart to be swayed by sentimental reasons alone.

There is no sniper position for him now, nothing so cold and removed. Soldier’s backup, the ace up the sleeve and the cheating component of not giving a damn anymore. He leans against the grease-stained alley wall, flexing and stretching to loosen up. He can taste the adrenaline build-up, the siren song in his veins. The tac jacket creaks as it settles, waiting for his cue. Waiting for the release of dropping into the white-out headspace of pure action and reactions, tactics and brawns. 

The staccato fire of an automatic weapon calls him to action. With everything he has, everything that’s been pumped into him, Soldier _runs_. He hits the pub’s back door with his shoulder and it doesn’t break as much as surrender under the assault. He charts a path through the fear-frozen cooks and dives headfirst through the pass towards the dining room. He lands low and rolls through the swinging doors as the shockwave of the flashbang rattles through the com. Back on his feet. He steps on a chair and up unto the bar. He can hear Emily yell but the words slip by. Windows give him a line of sight. She clears the car, turns around and two bullets hit her chest. Sternum and heart. She falls down.

“ _I’m right here, luv. Right here_ ,” says Doyle. P226 in his right hand, good muzzle discipline.

Emily gasps as Doyle bends down to rip open her shirt, exposing the vest beneath. “Good,” she says.

If Doyle is surprised he doesn’t have the time to show it. Soldier reaches the end of the bar and launches through the window. With a flick of the wrist, he throws one of Widow’s bites at the man, sticking it under his jaw. Doyle falls with a cut off scream and a convulsion. 

“Need a minute?” he asks Emily over his shoulder. He crouches and picks up Doyle to throw him over his shoulder like a sack of flour. 

“You call that subtle?” She pushes herself up to her elbows, winded and dazed but _alive_.

He shrugs. “You vetoed the C4.”


	4. Exfiltration

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter with the smut. It is in the section labelled "2006" if you'd rather skip it.

## 2011

The warehouse hadn't been the victim of anything more catastrophic than urban decay and economic entropy. It is vacant potential, kept empty on purpose though none of those were, properly speaking, beneficial. Somewhere in its depth, a maladjusted pipe leaks an uneven marker of time.

Drip. Drip. Dripdripdrip.

Soldier matches the rhythm with his fingers, metal ringing faintly from the contact with the handle of his knife.

Emily paces, burning off anxiety she won't verbalize as she looks at their prisoner. She is worried and scared, even now.

"Do you think we should…?"

Soldier shakes his head. "He's been awake for the last 287 seconds."

“That’s an impressive trick,” Doyle says, as he brings his head up and stretches until the muscles and bones crack in the release. He’s using the motion to test the bonds holding him to the chair, at the arm, legs and crisscrossing his torso. Annoyance flashes on his face.

The chair is metal framed and welded to the ground. Soldier tied the restraints. They’d hold him. They’ll hold Doyle, for exactly as long as he wants them to. 

“What’s this, then?” Doyle asks. He’s making himself relax, stop fighting. Reserving strength. A flicker of kinship sparks through Soldier’s mind. This man has known pain, from up close and personal. “I don’t hear sirens. Not going to turn me in, _Lauren_? Ran out of bidders with hellhole prisons to throw me in?”

“No,” Emily says. It’s unclear which part of the question she’s answering. “You should have left my team alone.” 

Doyle humms, craning his neck to look around them. He stares at the rust-coloured stains in the far corner. “Then why? Why keep me alive? Why bring me _here_.”

“You went through the trouble of securing this place,” Emily says. She stops pacing, runs the ruined ragged edges of her thumbnail over her fingertips. “Why waste it?”

“So you brought me the one place my men would know to come looking for me? That sounds… reckless.” 

“You think you still have men looking for you?” Soldier asks. He’s a bit offended by the idea.

“Oh, and who are you supposed to be,” Doyle asks. He cranes his face up, trying to read something off Soldier’s face and getting only his own reflection in the goggles. The mask makes people uneasy, as one of its tactical side effects. “Merc? I can pay you more than she can. Or are you the new mark she’s been throwing herself at? Has she said she’d marry you, yet?”

Bucky snickers. “That’d be news for my boyfriend.”

“Oh please—” Emily rolls her eyes at Bucky. “—As if his answer wouldn’t be to break out calendars and negotiate a joint custody agreement.” She sobers up. “The question is, why did _you_ want to bring me here, Ian? What was the endgame?”

“You, of course, you were always the endgame, Lauren.” 

“Bullshit.” She spits it at him. Wants more, honesty maybe, if she can’t have closure. “If you wanted me dead you’d have shot me in DC.”

"You didn't want her dead. You wanted her to _suffer_ ," Soldier cuts in. 

"No shit,” Doyle sneers. “I went through seven years of hell because of her."

"It's not the prison or even the torture." Soldier looks over at Emily who has gone silent and pale as a ghost. "It's more. And it's personal."

“Do you know what happened, in this place?” Doyle asks, addressing Soldier directly. “Because of her?”

Soldier doesn't answer. The plates of his metal arm shift and readjust, the rest of him still as a statue. Making himself other and inhuman. It works and Doyle shifts his focus to Emily. Under the mask, where no one but him can know, Soldier smirks. That was almost too easy.

"They couldn't break me until they showed me the pictures. They _laughed_. Declan got shot like a dog, in that corner. Because of you. And I am going to kill you there too."

"I know," Emily says. 

"You know?” For the first time, Doyle sounds surprised. He almost trips over his words. “How can you know?"

“I was the one holding the gun. “

Pain and anguish are two different things. Pain ends, either when the nerves burn out faster than the serum can regenerate them, or when the Handlers get bored. Pain ends after a mission, in the days after a public display, in the blessed moments of long-stakeouts and no sleep. Anguish doesn’t. Anguish is the soul ripping itself apart, a private thing that no outsider can touch and that rocks the foundation of reality. He’s seen it in Steve’s face as he fell off that train, felt it as he loathed himself under the praises of a completed Hydra kill. It’s with anguish that Doyle roars now, thrashing against the restraints and arcing in all the ways he can and that are ultimately useless.

"Do you want to know the last words Declan said to me?" Emily asks, turning the knife in the wound. Lancing the wounds in her own heart with this pain. "He said: 'I look pretty good for a dead boy' and then he hugged me, got on a plane, and I haven't seen him since."

It takes a moment for the words to sink in. For the self-protective anger to allow processing of meaning. "He's alive?" Doyle says, broken and raw.

"He is Ian. I won. I gave Declan his life, free from you. You will never find him, never see him. And he will be _everything_ he wants to be instead of your warrior."

"You're wrong. I will find him. He's my son and you can't keep him from me."

"Oh. But I have." Her voice lifts. She sounds younger, less jaded. Lauren, winning against her very own demon made flesh.

"Time's up," Soldier says. He drags the spare chair from the corner and drags it across the floor in a deliberate screech. He flips it in front of Doyle, straddles the cheap wood so the back digs against his ribs. 

Emily turns to him, rubs at her eyes to smear the tears threatening to spill over. "Kicking me out?"

"I'll catch up later. But now you need to go."

She wants to fight it. Wants the closure, wants to plead for mercy, wants the denial. Denial wins. "Fine." 

To her credit, she doesn't stretch it further. She gathers her jacket and the keys to the rental she knows her team will eventually track and leaves. He can't blame her for the long look over her shoulder. The space echoes with her steps a long time before she's gone. 

"So. That's who you are. The executioner."

"Me? I was never here." He reaches into his pocket and winds the chain through his flesh fingers. Doyle catches the glint as he raises it. Recognition. Soldier drapes the chain across Doyle’s lap, pooled in precarious balance.

"Bullshit," the defiance is wearing thin. "She's a cop. If not her, one of her little do-gooder team-mates will pick up the trail. You won't get away clean with killing me."

"That's the thing. You were never here either."

His metal hand opens a different pocket and closes around the small, glass tube there. Years of rooting out Hydra means he has run across their technological legacy more than most. The majority he's blown up when it was safe — and sometimes even when it was mad and risky — so that no one would get their hands on that arsenal. Some of it he funnelled into his own reserve. The world wasn't ready for Tesseract derived energy and weapons. After New York, it might never be. But damn it all, the universe owed him. Owed him at least _this_.

Blue light spills from his fingers, out of place in the dimness of abandoned bricks. 

It catches on Doyle's features, casting shadows in strange angles. Bringing out his eyes. The fear that grows there.

The moment stretches out. They have time, warrior to warrior, nothing but time and the familiar, almost friendly, presence of Death.

"My boy, he's safe?" 

"I don't know." Soldier answers truthfully. Why hadn't Emily called him in sooner? Things might not be any less of a mess but at least he'd know all the variables.

Doyle nods. "Look after Lauren?"

"No." Soldier removes the stopper from the tube and the blue light pours like a liquid, burning and churning as it takes over Doyle. It leaves nothing but the impression of ashes, a void of absence and dust. 

"But I will stand by Emily," Bucky says.

The sound of cars outside tells him he is out of time. He vanishes.

* * *

## 2006

The London flat is an indulgence, in the same sense that any place that could be traced to him is a risk. It isn’t anything anyone else would think as opulent: a large room in a refurbished attic with the only separation being the closet-sized shower. A bed, up in the corner against the wall with a mattress both new and free of bugs, the end of the mattress fitting under the plumbing for a lonely free-standing sink. An armoire for clothes, a hot plate and a fridge (sized for dormitory’s beer supplies). A card table he’d picked from a thrift shop, and a colourful rug underneath large enough to cover the loose floorboard where he hides anything that actually holds value. Just because Bucky can, and did, drift from safehouse to squats it doesn’t mean he doesn’t enjoy having an actual home, once in a while. 

All of which meant he isn’t overly surprised by the knock on his door. Disappointed, maybe. Grieving the illusion of permanence, assuredly. 

The knock comes again, less certain. Not law enforcement, nor someone bent on sworn revenge. The first would have shaken the frame and shouted their presence if they bothered to announce it at all. The second would be mid soliloquy. There was only one set of footsteps on the landing, nothing on the roof.

Bucky curls his fingers around one of his blades, out of sight at the small of his back. He opens the door a fraction of an inch, debating with his past self about the lack of both cameras and spy hole. 

Emily stands on the landing, drenched from the rain. Her skin is too pale, her eyes too wide. Shivers are not the only reason she is shaking.

There are many words that come to mind, things that he could say in that moment, but none of them are kind. Instead, he opens the door all the way and turns so she doesn’t have to sidestep around him too much. There is nowhere to sit in the flat except the bed, so she perches there, on the very edge. Habit makes him catalogue minute changes. Her hair is longer and probably styled differently when it isn’t falling like drapes over her face. There is no strain in her steps, no wounds or scar impeding movement. Yet hurt is radiating from her. Bucky moves slowly, making sure she can track his hands, as he grabs the one towel from the armoire and wraps her in it. He rubs her arms to dry her and bring the heat back into the limbs.

“They arrested him,” she says. He stills his hands but doesn’t move away. “Grabbed me and put me in a car then moved in with the arrest. He was watching as they took me in. I don’t think he believed I was being arrested as well. It was… clumsy.” 

“Yes.” 

“I didn’t know they were moving in. My people, my _team_ , didn’t tell me.” She looks up at him, meets his eyes for the first time. It’s the only warning he gets before she closes the space between them, claiming his lips in a kiss made clumsy by desperation. 

He moves one hand to her back, trailing the towel up to her hair with the other. There is only one bed and he’d prefer to avoid soaking it so fast. He kisses her back, slower and gentler until she matches his rhythm. He pulls away and she sucks in a breath before she buries her head against his neck. She is clinging, arms around his shoulder trying to negate any separation. 

“Why do you think they didn’t tell you?”

Silence, a sniffle chased by a shudder down her spine. “Because…” She stops, turns the words around her tongue, trying the size of them. “Because I would have warned him.” 

“Hmmm hmmm,” he takes away the towel, dumping it into the sink at the end of the bed to drain. “That’s not quite right, is it? You _might_ have. Might have warned him.”

“Might have,” she repeats, as an automatism. Not _good_ , but they can work on that. 

He runs his fingers through her hair, scratching at the scalp so that she leans into the touch. The slight movement exposes her throat and he takes the invitation for what it is, dropping kisses down the tendon there. She gasps and grabs for him, pulling him back into a kiss. Her tongue licks at his lips, pleading, seeking entry. It’s easy to indulge her, to free his hands to unbutton the blouse that hangs from her shoulders, to push it back and discard it. He follows the goosebump on her exposed skin with kisses, blowing warm air before he makes contact at every new location. He intends to map his way, to settle her down and welcome her home. She can use his skin to bury secrets in if that’s what she needs. She is certainly not the first and won't be the last.

Working off the pants takes more effort. They are plastered to her skin and there is no graceful way to wrangle them off without tearing the fabric. But Bucky is nothing if not resourceful. Emily lets herself be handled and moved, strangely listless now that the cold is receding from her bones. She looks up at the ceiling with a thousand yards stare.

Bucky perches on the edge of the bed and runs his fingers over her ribs. The soft cotton t-shirt he’d been wearing falls discarded to the floor. "Hey," he says softly, "you still with me, doll?"

The lack of answers speaks volumes in itself. He drops kisses on her shoulder, pets her side down to her hip in soothing caresses. 

"Stop."

Without his enhanced hearing Bucky isn't sure he would have heard. Even as close as they were. But he does hear and it runs through him like a shock. He backs away as much as he can, hands on the table and leaning on it enough that it starts to strain. Bucky tries to still his breathing, to get his pulse under control. Anything. Anything to show he isn't _them,_ not remotely like _them._

"Sorry," he says to fill the silence that looms now. "I thought—" The plates on his arm shift and grind with his recoil. He knows what he thought, and what he remembers beyond that. "It doesn't matter. Let me get you some dry clothes. Something to eat. I have ramen."

"Don't…" She stops, turns to face him before starting again. "Don't go."

"I don't understand what you want, Emily."

"I want you."

He frowns. "You told me to back off, so clearly not."

She sits up, scoots up the bed to lean against the wall with her legs curled underneath her. It leaves half of the bed open but now it doesn't feel so much like an invitation as a trap.

"I—" Her hand reaches to play with a thin chain, gold, and the three slim rings hanging from it. "Ian doesn't _do_ gentle. He tries, sometimes, but it never comes easy to him." The tremors from crying are gone now, banished to a box in her mind to be dealt with later. He can tell good compartmentalization when he sees it. 

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because she… I… liked it."

"You didn't use to." It’s not an accusation, though he can see her flinch and understands that she heard it as such. It’s a statement of facts, collected from the sporadic constellation of their history. 

"Being so wanted. How he would… conquer Laurent? It's everything I spent my whole life telling myself I never wanted. But when I had it? It was _good_." She puts emphasis on the last word, fingers dropping from the chain to trace down her arm. It highlights the fine lace of her bra and the swell of her breast. Her other hand is gathering a fist full of the blanket, white-knuckled. 

His mouth is dry, so the words are breathier than he would have liked. They betray the ghosts of a part of his past he isn’t keen to revisit. "I won't force you. I can't. You _can't_ ask me that."

"Oh god no. I know that. It's why I am here and not in the first meat market bar I could find in the city." She is offended and amused in turns and throws her head back to snicker at the mental image she is conjuring. Cover her mouth with her hand, relinquishing the death grip on the fabric. It loosens something in Bucky, making his shoulders drop a fraction. 

"So you came to me because?" 

"You're safe. And dangerous. I don't want that fantasy to remain Lauren's. That would give her, him, too much power. I want it, but I want it as _me_."

A deep breath. Another. He slowly lifts both hands from the table and crosses his arms across his chest. "I want to help, I do. But I can't handle grey zones. Not in this. I am going to need you to be incredibly blunt with me, Em."

"Ok. I can do blunt." She lifts her chin, looks him in the eyes properly. There is some of the fire he is used to rekindling there. "I want you out of those pants. I want you to manhandle me, to fuck me into this mattress. I want to feel it tomorrow when I go for another round of report and debrief. I want you to be the only thing I can remember on my skin."

"Because I am not him."

"Yes."

"Get off the bed," he says with an intentional growl. He undoes the buttons of his jeans, shoves them off without breaking eye contact.

She scrambles but there isn't much space so she ends up standing between the door and the kitchenette area. The incandescent bulbs bounce light off her skin, highlighting how pale she is against the navy blue of her underwear. He likes it, the contrast though it gives him other ideas. 

“Can I leave marks on you?” 

“Not where my boss’ boss can see,” she answers, breathy. Needy. It’s an interesting reaction, but it holds ambivalence.

“That wasn’t a confirmation.”

“Yes. Yes, you can. _Please_.” 

“Good.” 

He moves, one loping step to get into her personal space. Her heartbeat spikes, driven by the sharp inhale as she steps back, crowded against the door. Adrenaline, for sure, eyes wide and pupil dilated from the sudden fear or from desire. Bucky realizes it’s the first time she’s ever seen that darkness in him from up close and personal. She hasn’t been on the opposite side of him, out there on the field. Not in the way Widow has. He slows a fraction until she smirks. He rushes the rest of the way, softens the hit of her head against the door with his fingers only because it gives him a better grip to angle her mouth as he bends down to claim a kiss. She doesn't want gentle so that is not what he gives her, applying controlled pressure on the hinges of her jaw until she can do nothing but gasp. He kisses and licks into her, pulls at her lips with his teeth before going for more. It isn't long before Emily isn't kissing back as much as trying to suck in air, from the brief respite or from his own lungs.

Bucky pulls away by a few inches and Emily whimpers as she draws breath, trying to chase his lips and unable. She is caged between him and the door, nowhere to go but where he wants her. Her legs shake in a tremor close to giving out. That won't do. He lets go of her head and grabs at her hips, lifting so she doesn't touch the floor anymore. There is a squeaked gasp but he ignores it. He wedges a leg between hers, pinning her to the door. The satin lace is damp against his leg. Good but not enough. 

He leverages her higher, pressing against her mound with his tight. One hand holds her hip so she can't move or grind for more. The other goes to cover a breast. He palms over the fabric and warm flesh, kneading and scratching with his nails on a random pattern. His mouth finds her neck again, kissing and biting along the rabbit-fast pulse. He pulls at the chain there until it bits into her skin. He moves down to her collar bones with slightly harder bites, leaving ghost impressions that will fade before the night is out. Too high, too public even with the button-up business-appropriate uniform she'd pick. He bends his neck, goes lowers on her left side. Find the place where the swell of her breast just flows from the cup of the bra. Moves the fabric a fraction of an inch aside and bites down with intent. 

Bucky nibbles and sucks, changing angles and pressure and lapping at the angry skin. He can feel the warmth spread under his lips and tongue until the skin is pulsing with pain and unspilled blood. Until there’s an angry bruise there that will bloom and grow and pulse under all her clothes, with the underwear pressing down with each movement in front of whatever commission she has to face. His right-hand tortures the other breast, pinching and rolling over the hardened nipple in a counterpoint rhythm. He always was a good dancer. 

Beneath him Emily squirms and pants, groans littles cries that threatens to reach a noise complaint level. Her hands tangle in his hair, pulling him away and pushing him against her chest, her elbows try to drive a wedge between them as her legs and knees climb around his waist. 

“Please,” she wails at last, “please, please, please.”

“Please what?” A growl, right by her ear, so he can feel the shudder of it as it echoes through her. 

“Please fuck me.” 

She doesn’t weigh a thing thanks to the servo-motors in the metal arm as he spins them around. She bounces on the bed with a yelp. He doesn’t give Emily time to reorient, flips her face down and rearranges limbs so her knees are beneath her and her arms can protect her head against the wall. There is almost not enough room as he kneels behind her, his own feet pressing about the galvanized steel of the piping to the sink. Bucky makes a note to be careful because a sudden water leak is a mood killer. 

Bucky trails kisses down her spine, runs both hands down her sides to hold her in place. She pleads, muffled by the thin, cheap, pillow and blanket. The sounds burn through him, a line of fire that hits like a punch and forces his awareness inward. Now that he has no choice but to acknowledge his body he can tell just how hard he is. His dick strains and twitches against her leg. He drags his flesh fingers over the thin bead of precum and down his length, shudders at the too-much-and-not enough sensation.

Emily chuckles, neck craned to look back at him. Her hair is a messy nest and her mouth still hangs slightly open, teasing the tip of her tongue against her lips. He doesn't give her a chance to finish formulating whatever sassy one-liner she is trying to string together. His right-hand gathers her hair and pulls so she has to face forward, arching her back. With his left hand, he pulls the thin fabric of her panties aside — now thoroughly drenched. He teases only briefly, before sinking two fingers into her. She reacts beautifully, in a great wave from her still trapped hair to her hips. There is nowhere to go and he drops more of his weight over her back as a ravenous blanket. He knows the vibranium is cold against her heat, smooth, alien. He feels it against his shoulder and knows intimately how the engineered fingers feel. He moves his hand slowly, curling inside of her just to feel her squirm. 

"Still with me?" He breathes the words against her ear, nibbles on the lobe. 

"YES! Fuck yes." Emily pants. "Christ, do it already."

He chuckles and lets go of her hair. He replaces his fingers with his cock, groans as he sinks into the welcoming heat. Normally he'd give himself a moment to savour, give her time to adjust. But nothing normal is being asked of him. So he holds her hips, fingertip constellations digging into the flesh to bloom purple and blue later. 

Each snap of his hips drives Emily forward until she is pushing back against the wall with her hands. She pants and moans and tries to meet his rhythm but cannot quite get it right, disorganized gyrations. She screams with an orgasm he is pretty sure takes her by surprise.

He slows, stops, as she shakes beneath and around him. Bucky bends to rest his head between her shoulder blades, crooning shushing sounds.

"Finish it," Emily says when her breath normalizes. "I can take it. I want it."

"You sure?"

She nods. "I want to feel you, now and tomorrow. I want you to let go of some of that control and take what you want for once. I want the soreness and aches."

It's his turn to groan. He can't detect lies in her words and he _wants_. He bites the skin between the scapula and the spine, resumes the movement of his hips. It's good, searing pleasure from his cock and up his spine. He swears he can feel the pleasure down to his fingertips, even the man-made ones. He only holds on to enough awareness outside of himself to make sure nothing gets broken as he chases that high. 

He leaves more bites on her back, faint outlines, marks down her spine darker to match the ones on her hips. Emily bites the fleshy part of her own hand now, trying to swallow her sounds. He feels her shudder again, squeezing around his cock like a vice as he fucks her through that second orgasm. He reaches to palm her breasts, straighten so she is sitting up on his lap. He moves all of her, bounces her on his cock, metal fingers digging into the bruise he has left under her bra. 

Bucky comes with a cut-off Russian curse, crushing Emily to his chest. She gasps for breath and he releases her immediately. He pulls out with a hiss and rolls off the bed to the floor.

"I forgot to grab a condom," he says, mortified.

"Still on the implant," she answers. "I’m more concerned about the panties. These were expensive"

"I don't have spare blankets."

"Unfortunate. How do you feel about government-funded hotels?"

"How's the room service?"

“Not good enough to get you out of buying me new underwear.” 

They both laugh. Bucky looks at the ceiling, smug. There is a sound of nails on metal, like someone unclasping a chain. 


	5. Interlude

“Sir, the information packet on Doyle came through from Interpol,” Penelope says as she hands the packet over to Reid. It is always faster to hand documents to him first and no one in the team argues. “And there’s something you should know.” 

“What is it Garcia?” 

“The operation that put him away… Emily was on that team.” It is about as diplomatically as she’d been able to figure out how to drop that particular bomb. 

“Why didn’t she tell us?” Morgan asks, angry. He’d been angry all week, ever since Emily took some of the time off she never took to go deal with an emergency for a relative she isn’t close to. Morgan probably has a point, being angry. 

“Get Prentiss on the phone, we need her to come in for this.” Hotch narrows his eyes as he says it. He doesn’t like the picture this new information paints any more than Morgan, but he’s better at keeping a lid on things. 

“I tried, Sir. No answer. And, before you ask, I couldn’t get a ping on her cellphone either.” She’s hated every second of it. Like she hates turning her considerable skills against any of the people she works with. She values their privacy because she knows how much of an illusion it is. 

“Why didn’t she come to us? We’re her family, we could have helped,” Reid says in a plaintive voice. He looks at everyone in turn, with big watery eyes. Reid doesn’t deal well with feeling helpless when a loved one is ailing. No one contradicts him. 

“Because Doyle kills family,” Rossi answers, in his best soothing tone. “He probably threatened us. She ran to protect us.”

“Rossi, Morgan, go check her apartment. See if she left us any clue. Reid, Seaver, and Garcia, get everything we can on Doyle, from before he was arrested. We catch him, we save Emily.” 

The team scatters at Hotch’s words, to their assigned tasks. Reid hands over the heavily redacted documents he’s already read to Seaver. Penelope retreats to her den and her screens, where she’ll be the most effective. She cracks her knuckles, sends a prayer to the Universe to protect reckless profilers, and she gets to digging. 

An hour later, she almost wishes she wasn’t quite as good at her job and only half as persuasive getting police departments around the country to cooperate. 

In her years at the BAU, Penelope Garcia has seen horrors that would rival some of the deepest, seediest, parts of the Internet’s collective imagination. She’s studied videos of torture and pain and broken them down frame by frame, tracked criminal through the smallest breadcrumbs of digital trail. None of it made watching her teammates, her family, in harms’ way any easier. 

And even that, those most personal horrors of Spencer on the chair, of Dereck in her ear, of Hotch in the hospital with too many holes, none of it prepared her for the surveillance video outside of a bar in Boston. 

“Emily walked into a trap. It looks like Doyle got into the SUV, but from this angle, you can see that he didn't.” The video pauses on the large screen TV behind her. She takes a deep breath before continuing. “Or at least that’s what Doyle had planned. I don’t think he was expecting this next bit.”

She presses play on the remote, clutching it nervously. On the screen, a pixelated version of Doyle shoots Emily twice and moves in for what could have been a finishing shot. Instead, the entire front of the pub explodes in glass shards, broken by a humanoid-shaped blurry-missile as Doyle convulses and falls to the ground. The blur resolves into a man, his face obscured by a mask and goggles. There are enough reference points in the street to know that he’s six feet tall and built like a brick house.

“She’s not afraid,” Morgan says. “Run that last part again?” He squints at the screen as Penelope rewinds the action and replays it slower. “See? He is waiting for her and she’s laughing right there. Whoever that is, she knows him.” 

“Hold that thought,” Penelope says. “Because I am a digital goddess I went looking for other angles. There wasn’t much in that area, but I did get this still image.” 

She pressed the button to bring up the image. It was low resolution, black and white and grainy. But it showed the same man, carrying Doyle over his shoulder. The angle was different, displaying his left side. The jacket he wears is cut at the shoulder and exposes an arm that seems to be made entirely out of metal. Emily is beside him, her hand on his elbow. The angle of her body doesn’t look like she’s holding for support. It is softer, more comfortable.

“That level of prosthetic isn’t civilian grade,” Reid says. “There was no stiffness in the video.”

“Military?” Seaver asks.

“Almost. As it turns out one of Emily’s old teammates, Clyde Easter, is currently working for S.H.I.E.L.D. “ Hotch waits for the collective groan to subside. The Bureau isn’t used to getting ordered out of cases and locales: four years is too short for that kind of catastrophic seismic shift. “I say we go and ask him what he knows.”

“You think S.H.I.E.L.D. sanctioned this?” Rossi asks. “One _human_ terrorist seems out of their scope.”

“No,” Hotch shakes his head. “But Easter will know what’s in those redacted files. Safehouses, bases of operations.” 

“Do you think he’ll tell us?” Penelope asks. 

Hotch points at the screen. “He probably doesn’t want this to go viral.” 

The Triskelion is beautiful. Not that Penelope doesn’t appreciate the grey carpeted wonders of Quantico and the fact that she can have several crates worth of personal items in her area. That appreciation doesn’t take away from the sheer wonder of modern construction and design that could be achieved when money was no object. And S.H.I.E.L.D. has money by the bucketful, a never-ending stream of it as if budgetary meetings and rationalization have never graced their lips. 

They have their own bridge and moat, like some fantasy castle or fortress, for crying out loud.

The team, split into two large SUVs, passes the first security checks on Federal IDs, all the way to the visitor’s parking lot and the lobby. The lobby itself is as wide as some plazas in the city, with a large statue of their eagle emblem in the middle. It looked very dark, in a stark contrast against the polished white and grey of the concrete around it and under the almost unimpeded natural light of the curved glass ceiling. 

“I’ll need IDs and the name of who you’re coming to see,” the security guard says as Hotch approaches the counter. There’s no sign-in book, nothing analogue at all. Only the glow of a Stark tech clear screen below the counter and the quick green flash of laser facial recognition. 

“SSA Aaron Hotchner of the B.A.U. coming to see Clyde Easter.” He rattles off the rest of their names and credentials, with the same machine-gun delivery he uses with slightly less than enthusiastic local PDs. The security guard looks unimpressed through it all. He is secure in knowing that the bureaucratic food-chain has a new apex predator.

“Mr. Easter doesn’t have any visitors on his log for today,” the guard says. It’s an old dance, Penelope thinks. Hotch will ask him to call to verify now and there’ll be a ten-minute stand-off, so she braces for waiting. Which leaves her utterly un-braced for the guard’s actual next sentence. “But I can issue them guest access under your ID, Doctor, if you’re going to accompany them inside the facilities.”

It is easy to forget that the members of the B.A.U. are, each and every one of them except maybe Penelope herself, trained and fully lethal federal agents. After all, they are often each other’s safe space and support system, the first person they reach out to when they struggle and the ones they have the most drunken dirt on. Until the moment the entire team turned to face one Doctor Spencer Reid, who was looking at the clouds past that curved glass, no doubt calculating the exact vector curve and the tensile strength of the architecture. The team waits, patient, like some collective-brained hunting animal or pack. Reid eventually has to look at them, doing that twitchy smile that means he really doesn’t want to acknowledge what’s going on.

“That’d be fine, William.” 

“I’m confused,” Seaver said. “Why does Reid have security privileges with S.H.I.E.L.D. How does he know that guy’s name?”

“I remember everyone’s name,” Reid answered and he started walking away from them, through the opened security gates.

“Huh huh, not so fast pretty boy,” Morgan says as he jogs to catch up. Reid can walk freakishly fast on those long legs of his. “You didn’t answer Seaver’s question.”

“The security guard is called William Crabtree, he’s hoping to one day make it as an agent, and I can buzz all of you in because S.H.I.EL.D. has been trying to recruit me for a while. I have an office here and everything. It’s on the 22nd floor, with a view over the river. I can give you the tour if you want, or we can focus on finding Emily.” The last sentence falls all of him in one long string of words, driven by annoyance and worry. The pink on his ears doesn’t lie. Spencer Reid is blushing, maybe even ashamed.

“An office? And you didn’t tell us?” Rossi asks in a half tease.

“Why would I? It’s not like I was going to say yes. You think I’d leave my family for a better health plan and way, way, cooler toys?”

“It is nice, to be appreciated,” Rossi answers with a sigh. 

They follow Reid away from the lobby and into a serpentine series of corridors with beautifully lit offices and operation planning rooms. It is a slow process. Reid does know everyone and he stops every few feet to return a greeting and exchange socially positive small talk. He has a tidbit of information about every single person, asking about their sister’s kid, or an upcoming birthday, or the state of a project that only exists as a series of numbers and letters (and that the rest of the team clearly had no clearance to even know). It is beautiful as it is exhausting, walking miles down the eidetic memory Reid carries with him everywhere. The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents look at the rest of them with curiosity and the same kind of forced warmth and smile people usually give groups of touring highschoolers on career day. 

“How do you even make it to briefings at home?” Penelope asks after the last group of people in improbable uniforms walk away from them.

“I’ve asked them to stop,” Reid answers, almost absently. “Most of the people at Quantico either see me as a kid or know I’m on this team and don’t want any of our business. The other’s I’ve asked to stop. And they mostly respect my wishes.”

“Why not do that here?” Hotch asks. 

Reid shrugs. “Their orders include something about making friends with me. As far as I can tell. And I don’t want to be the reason anyone gets a poor performance review.” 

Morgan snickers and punches Reid on the shoulder, not hard enough to hurt, playful roughhousing. Derek is always careful around Spencer, making sure he doesn’t step across the line from big brother to bully. “Orders. Or a betting pool, pretty boy.”

“Maybe.” He stops at one of the grey doors, unmarked and unremarkable. “We’re here.” He reaches for the door handle and Peneloppe hears the tell-tale sounds of an electronic lock being released before his fingers wrap around it. He is not wearing any keycard, nothing that could carry an RFID signal. That observation sits at the back of Penelope’s head, heavy with implications and it makes her look up and around. She cannot see any cameras, but that is little comfort. 

There is a woman inside of the office. Her blond hair is pulled back into a severe-looking bun. It matches the rest of her: cold and uncomfortable looking. Whoever she is, she is not one ex-Interpol French man going by the name of Clyde Easter.

“Yes?” she barks, looking up from a screen that goes dark as soon as her eyes leave it. 

“Oh, I am sorry. I thought. I am so sorry,” Reid stammers. He looks nervous now, or maybe he’s hiding behind a front of it, smoke and mirror Vegas magic. “I’m looking for Clyde Easter. I thought this was his office.” 

“He moved floors. There _are_ maps.” She turns back to her screen, her face highlighted in cold green light and for all intent and purposes, it was as if they have ceased to exist.

They consult a map, after that. A dazzling overengineered interactive thing, embedded into a wall that traces a path back across the way they came and into a different wing entirely. The lowering sun shines in her eyes by the time they reach the office. Penelope checks the time on her phone. Somehow it’s late afternoon now, the day sunk into bureaucratic nonsense. There is no signal and she takes a few careful, deep, breaths. Just before there could have been a message doesn’t mean there was one. And that she missed it. That it would be Emily that pays for it.

“Come in,” a man’s voice says as the door opens with a soft hiss of pneumatic hinges. Clyde Easter looks remarkably like himself from the file. The decade has deepened some lines on his face but otherwise done very little damage. He’s sitting at a desk that is devoid of any document or hint of what it is exactly he does for a living here. “I’m afraid there won’t be room for more than two of you. But there is a very nice staff lounge just down the corner.” 

“Garcia with me. the rest of you wait for us,” Hotch says. Penelope is surprised by the call. Usually he’d take Rossi with him, or Reid, or Morgan. Someone to balance out his intimidation factor. Then again, she is the one holding the smoking gun. So to speak. Smoking USB drive. 

There is a minimal amount of grumbling, most of it in the non-vocal range and expressed with raised eyebrows and shrugs until Reid coughs and starts moving down the corridor. The others follow at a more sedated pace. 

“There, isn’t that better,” Easter says. “Please, come in, close the door. I would offer you a drink but it is against company policy to have alcohol on-site and unlike some places, they check.” 

Hotches ushers her in, closing the office’s door. He flips that switch that makes him go from stern boss to _dangerous_. He’s terrifying like this, and it’s not even Penelope he’s looking at. “We need to know about Doyle.” 

“I’m sure you would love to. But, SSA Hotchner, those files are very far out of your security clearances.” Easter smiles as he says it. It is a consummate professional smile, all teeth and no warmth. 

“So is this,” Hotch says and he looks at Penelope. 

“Oh right, yes, video.” She grabs her phone from her purse, sets it up on top of the closest pile of paperwork and presses play. She knows what’s playing on the screen so she looks at the man instead, trying to see whatever it is the rest of the team sees in these situations. Trying not to be a dead weight, to be useful. 

“Oh non, le fils de pute,” he sighs. 

“What did he say?” Penelope asks as she turns to Hotch.

“That I’m going to help you, darling. Because I am not being paid enough to deal with _that_.” He pauses. “I would ask if this is the only copy, but since I doubt you filmed it yourself, it clearly isn’t the case.”

“It can be,” Penelope starts, before the slight squint of Hotch’s eyes makes her fall silent. 

“Doyle, what can you tell us?” Hotch settles back in his chair as much as he ever settles back in anything. It’s more that he stops leaning forward, than really any relaxing of his spine or shoulders. 

“Let me make a call, I’ll have the JTF-12 files sent over to you.” Easter offers, making a gesture towards his computer. 

“We already have those,” Peneloppe pips up. She takes the cellphone back from the desk, so her hands have something to play with.

“Do you? Well, what are you doing here? There’s not really much point is it, if you already have what you’re looking for.”

“No, we don’t,” Hotch answers, getting the other man to focus back on him. “We both know there are things that didn’t make the official reports. Your team was profiling terrorists, not every detail gets logged, especially things unrelated to the actual sting. Doyle is in Boston and so is Emily. I don’t care about an operation in Europe. Tell me about Boston and stop wasting our time.”

Easter ran a hand over his face. “Emily’s not in any danger, you know that right? She’s currently as safe as anyone can be on the field, even if it means you dropped a massive bureaucratic nightmare on my lap.”

“I’ll be the judge of that. I’ve gone over the recommendation you wrote her for the BAU. You sold her to us the same way you sold Doyle to the North Koreans, saying the things you knew we wanted to hear. I’m not sure I trust your assessment.”

“Just because you wanted to hear them doesn’t make them not true.” Ester opens a drawer of his desk, retrieves a notepad and a pen. “Boston. There is a warehouse, where they both have a lot of history. I’d start there.” He writes the address on the paper, in long elegant swirly script. “While we were setting up to make contact we had a few safehouses. I’d have to see if any of them still exist, it’s been a long time.” 

“Send us the locations as soon as you can.” 

“Of course. And the video?”

“What video?” Hotch answers with superbly faked innocence.

“Right.” Easter’s smirk this time is genuine, making his eyes sparkle. “I get why she likes working with you, you know.”

“I’ll send you the files,” Penelope says. “As soon as you tell me where?” 

He waves the offer off. “Send me a list of the sources. S.H.I.E.L.D. will take it from there.” He winks and hands her a card. “This is fun. We should do this again, cooperating. It all feels very healthy.” 

Hotch stands and opens the door, waiting for Penelope to get out. He hesitates, on the threshold. “Your agent. You really think he’s not a threat?”

Easter snickers. “He’s not so much _ours_ as he is — maybe — _the Captain’s_. But no, he’s not a threat. Not to Emily, anyway. I cannot vouch for anyone else’s safety.” 

There are two things unspoken Peneloppe can pick up from that. One, that Doyle is probably not going to be breathing by the time they get to Boston. Two, that _anyone else_ includes the team. 

Hotch nods. 

“Call the others. We need to get to the plane.” 

He starts walking away towards the exit and Peneloppe shuffles along, thumb-typing furiously on her good work phone. Texts, getting a flight plan, connecting with the local PD for backup. This, this she can do.


	6. Safehouses

## 2011

Boston on the brink of dawn is like most major cities across the USA, or across the world. A little otherworldly, a little sleepy. There is a hush over the streets as if the world has been dampened by strings of quickly evaporated mist. It had been her favourite hour in Rome, in a different life. Feeling as if time itself was thinner as if the world was less solid and everything that was possible could be reached at their fingertips. 

Some of that joy remains, but Emily is older, more jaded. She knows now at least some of that feeling was exhaustion, the effects of a brain high on the fumes of its own chemicals. She should try to eat something, drink something. Maybe shower. But all she wants is to sleep. 

The safehouse is a basement apartment under a pawn shop that was probably never zoned as residential in the first place. It made the num-pad lock blend-in a little bit so that is a plus. The area as a whole isn’t. Especially since she’d turned in the rental and walked the last ten blocks with one hand on the butt of a gun. The last thing she needs is for an overambitious drunk to decide she looked like prey. Not that there is anyone out at this time, while the city dreams. 

She presses the combination to the satisfying sound of a lock disengaging and pushes the door open. Toes of her shoes. Hangs her jacket on the industrial hooks drilled in the wall. She raises her gun, blinking against the too-bright neons that buzz overhead, in the same movement. She should be alone and isn’t. Something went wrong, very wrong.

“Really? You’re going to shoot me, Prentiss?” Morgan’s voice, matching the raised eyebrow and sparkling eyes. Somehow, impossibly Morgan. In the flesh and leaning against the back of the puke green couch the place was outfitted with some time in the 70s.

“I don’t think she’s going to shoot any of us,” Rossi said, amused. He was sitting on the couch, twisted to look at her in ways that had to be bad for a spine of that vintage. 

Emily lowers, the gun, engages the safety and drops it into the pocket of her coat. “What are you doing here?”

“We came for you,” Reid says, plaintively. “We wanted to help. You didn’t have to run.”

“Yes, she did,” Hotch says. And somehow it wasn’t harsh, it was only firm. It was the voice he used with Jack, with Henry. His fatherly voice. "Based on all the information she had, she was keeping us safe."

“If you’re gonna bring me in,” Emily says, feeling every inch of her exhaustion. Her mind already tallies the crimes on her ledger, from the assault on Faheyto the flash-bang she threw in the car, to the other thousand ways she spurned the spirit of the law in a handful of days. “I won’t fight. Please, let me sleep on the plane?”

A strangled noise and a flash of bright colours are all the warning Emily gets before she has an armful of Garcia, wrapping her in a hug. “They’re not going to arrest you. We came to take you home.” Garcia pulls away, righting her clothes as she stares at Hotch. “Right?” 

“That’s not the plan.”

Just like that she is surrounded by her team, her family, squeezed into hugs as they all whisper kind words in her ear. The words themselves don’t matter, though she could always ask Spencer to repeat or transcribe them down later. “Welcome home,” they are saying, in all their different ways. “Welcome _home_.”

Later, once Rossi has shoved a bowl of soup in her hands, something tomato and beans based that she wouldn’t dare call minestrone to his face, they talk. 

“How? How could you be waiting for me?”

“Clyde Easter,” Hotch answers. “He gave us a few leads. The local PD checked out a few, this was the last of the list. We were hoping the intel was right.”

“Serves me right for being predictable,” Emily says, slurping the soup’s broth straight from the bowl. It hides the frown on her face. Sloppy. That had been a sloppy mistake. Had she wanted to be caught? To be punished? Probably. She deserves it, she deserves much worse than this strange amorphous support and the outpour of love that fuels it. 

Emily isn’t used to being considered, to _matter_. 

“Prentiss, you know I have to ask,” Hotch starts, back in Unit Chief mode. “Should I be looking for a body?” The excited chatter around the room dies. The rest of the team waits, suddenly tense. None of them disagree with her actions, with what they can guess went down tonight. But the law is the law and that absolute defines Hotch like no other absolute. Even if it kills him, there are rules and protocols and things that can be bent but not broken. A body means there is a crime, a need to prosecute. 

“You can look,” Soldier says from inside the apartment, somehow. One of these days Emily was going to figure out how he did it. “But you won’t find any.” 

The reaction is instantaneous. Morgan, Hotch and Rossi draw their guns taking aim and bracing. Seaver pulls Garcia behind her, which is interesting. Spencers starts asking questions but is drowned out by a very high pitch ramble from Garcia.

“Oh my god. Oh my god! You’re him! From the video, with the window and the glass and the” she gesticulates towards his left arm even as she speaks. 

Soldier doesn’t move. He’s coiled like a cat ready to pounce, two of his blades in his hand, facial expression obscured by the mask. He took off the goggles so his eyes are visible, scanning over the room and the surplus of people within. Devising a plan of attack, maximizing efficiencies. It’s a strange, chilling, effective, display of power without moving. 

Emily can sense the unease spreading across her team, affecting the cool of their own training. And beneath it all, the very masculine need to posture and establish hierarchy. She shakes her head, rolls her eyes, and calls out.

“Stand down, Soldier. They didn’t come to throw me in a cage.” 

She’s thankful that he doesn’t ask if she’s sure. He takes her word for it with a shrug and the blades vanish, somewhere on his person. 

“Emily?” Morgan asks, risking a glance her way. 

“Please put down the guns guys. He’s a _friend_.” 

It takes longer for them to lower their weapons, to relax. Bucky ignores them. He unclips the muzzle and drops it on the kitchen counter. Rossi moves out of the way so that Bucky can rummage through the cupboards, emerging with a handful of individually wrapped gas station jerky and two boxes of french cookies. _Petits Écoliers_ , Emily thinks. Buttery sablés with milk chocolate. Emily is struck with sense memory from being a kid. She hasn’t had those cookies in years. 

“ _No_ ,” Bucky says around a mouthful of jerky. He hops unto the kitchen counter, the wall at his back and a clear line of sights on everyone.

“I didn’t even ask,” she complains. She can see her team’s confusion, but also the relaxing. The banter acts like a signal, no threat here. A healthy dose of suspicion, but no need for immediate violence.

“I saw the look. Why do you think I hide all my snacks?” Bucky winks at her, rips open the next plastic sleeve to access the atrocity done to what was once meat hidden beneath. 

Emily laughs. She’s alright. Doyle is gone. Her team is here. Altogether she feels years younger and like a weight has lifted from her shoulders. She makes a round of introduction and though the conversation is clipped and tense, it doesn’t go badly. It’s better than what she could have hopped in her most unhinged dreams.

She flops back on the couch, lets the tension drain from her as the laugh turns to giggles and gasping breaths. It takes a while for her to settle down, long enough that Garcia and Reid start talking about recent Avengers activities, obviously trying to rope Bucky into their conversation. Rossi and Hotch mumble whisper their plans for the team’s next actions. They’ll have to justify the jet’s expense, the deployment when the locals didn’t invite them in. Morgan answers questions from Seaver as best he can, his eyebrows betraying that he’s feeling a bit overwhelmed. 

Sharp, repeated, chimes from a cellphone interrupts the stuttering conversation. Out of habit, everyone brings their hands to their pockets (or purse) to check their own phone. Bucky wipes his hand on his pants, scattering crumbs from the second box of cookies. 

“That’s mine. Tapped under the table? Pass it over?” Bucky says, not getting down from his vantage point. 

Morgan is the one to move, rip the duck tape and reveal a cheap burner phone under the furniture. He tosses it in an easy underhand throw. Making a show of respecting established boundaries. 

Bucky smiles at that, and Emily stifles a laugh at the look on Seaver’s face. Remembers Tsia’s warning about trouble and finally knows what expression she must have worn on that first day.

“Busted?” she asks instead of teasing the younger woman. 

“So busted,” Bucky answers, squinting at the flip-up screen. His eyes have gone soft in a way she’d rarely seen. Steve then, rather than high ranked S.H.I.E.L.D. officer calling him in. “Also you’re invited to dinner next week.”

The confirmation takes her by surprise as much as the invitation. She knows of Steve, everyone knows about Captain America and his sudden reappearance from the dead. Met him a few times at official S.H.I.E.L.D. events, enough to get a sense of the person beneath the suit, in broad strokes. Not enough to expect the invitation to their house for dinner, intimate, like a friend. “Want me to bring bread or wine?” 

“Bread. We don’t get drunk.” He hops down from the counter, waves at the group and is out the door before anyone reacts. He leaves behind nothing save wrappers and empty cookie boxes.

“What was that?” Rossi asks.

“Seriously, Emily. You have got to share with the class,” Garcia adds.

“Later,” she says. “Let’s get out of here.” 

She wants to sleep and afterward, when it’ll be a new day, she’ll figure how to even begin to explain. And which part of the story she’ll never tell them.

A girl has got to have her secrets, after all. 


End file.
